January 5, 2013

There is a controversy surrounding the film for its depiction of torture, which moviegoers have to sit through in the first third or so of the film. The Manchester Guardian went so far as to liken Ms. Bigelow to the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl (which would make the Obama administration what?). In fact the film treats torture in a way that we would characterize as more journalistic than anything else and, in any event, ambiguous. One can imagine, if still only that, the difficulty of sorting out the transcripts that torture produces. And the capacity for error. There is a particularly harrowing portrayal of the catastrophe at Forward Operating Base Chapman, where seven CIA operatives were slain by a suicide bomber in 2009.